07 July 2004 at 11:28 AM, post #47

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Paul Gilroy’s ambitious study of black Britain spans the period from the Enlightenment to Toni Morrison. He uses ships and sailors as central metaphors for explaining the culture he terms the “black Atlantic,” which includes not only black Britain but journeys to and from Europe, America, the Caribbean and Africa. The fluid nature of Gilroy’s metaphor supports his argument for flexible constructions of identity and his opposition to “pure” constructions of race and nationalism.

Gilroy argues that the hybridity of the black Atlantic serves as a counterculture to bounded modernities, including chapters on the concepts of masters, mistresses and slaves in the development of modernity; black music; Germany, W.E.B. Du Bois and “double consciousness”; France and Richard Wright; and the memory of slavery and the utility of the diaspora concept.

Most of the subject matter of The Black Atlantic is located outside of the 1790s, but Gilroy places the achievements of early black Atlantic citizens “partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of Enlightenment and its operational principles” (48), even as their poetics and politics worked against the narrow scope of English nationalism. He discusses Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime, which depends on the interchangeability of darkness and blackness. Drawing on the work of Peter Linebaugh and others, he also writes about blacks involved in radical and working-class movements, such as Robert Wedderburn. Gilroy concludes by calling for a “more modest formulation of tradition” (192) that would challenge Africentrism and which would value “mutation, hybridity, and intermixture en route to better theories of racism and of black political culture” (223).

07 July 2004 at 11:27 AM, post #46

Coleman, Deirdre. “Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s.” ELH 61:2 (Summer 1994): 341-362.

Coleman begins her article by bluntly stating her objective to “examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women’s protest writing” (341). The article describes the metaphorical use of slavery by those fighting for women’s rights, then focuses on a 1795 lecture by Coleridge entitled “A Lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance” delivered after abolitionist enthusiasm had already begun to wane.

This lecture, Coleman argues, lends “credence to the claim that the ideology of anti-slavery is closely allied to that of colonization and imperialism” (345), much in the tradition of Carl Wadstrom and Thomas Jefferson, who supported the establishment of freed slave colonies in Africa as beneficial to European and American economies. The article returns to a discussion of “women’s issues” with an account of Coleridge’s sneering condemnation of women who express sensibility but passively or actively condone slavery, “setting the white woman in opposition rather than alongside her black African counterpart” (351). She discusses such women writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen.

During the 1790s, the connection between women, blackness and the irrational primitive was already being constructed, argues Coleman. Advocates of slavery used fears of connection between white women and black men and resulting miscegenation. Even abolitionist cartoons express a panic that the abolition of slavery would lead to the crossing of essential boundaries of black and white. “Accepting the black man as an equal and as a brother… is essential for ending the violent blood-letting of slavery; the fear remains, however, of the perilous intimacies abolition will bring, the fear of a blood disseminated” (359), writes Coleman.

07 July 2004 at 11:24 AM, post #45

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Butler’s main objective is to place Jane Austen within the political context in which she wrote, a time in which readers sought the political in all writing and the almost total absence of politics within Austen’s novels constituted a politically conservative stance and support for status quo social systems, posits Butler. In Austen’s world of leisured middle-class characters and unchanging country villages, the plots and “crucial action of her novels is in itself expressive of the conservative side in an active war of ideas” (294), Butler writes.

In the process of contextualizing Austen in Part I, Butler discusses sentimentalism, the philosophical underpinnings and examples of Jacobin novels such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, the Anti-Jacobins, whom Butler characterizes as powerful but rather talentless, and the works of the Jacobin, feminist, and politically ambivalent Maria Edgeworth.

In Part II, Butler discusses Austen’s major works. She rhetorically questions the worth of Austen’s work, given her conservatism and intellectual orthodoxy, but concludes that Austen’s skill in creating images and in balancing naturalism and moralism render her work still valuable. Her conservative values are established not only by the absence of politics in her novels, but also in the omission of the irrational and sensuous from the inner lives of her characters, her focus on the landed gentry, and the “ideal progress” (293) of her novels, in which the protagonist learns to accept social pressures and is rewarded with marriage.

07 July 2004 at 11:22 AM, post #44

Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Clemit argues that the novels of William Godwin and his followers Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley, arguing that they are tied together by common narrative models and an investigation of similar philosophical themes. Citing scholarship such as Gary Kelly’s The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 and Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Political Justice , Clemit contends in Part I that “there is a greater unity between Godwin’s fiction and his philosophy than has generally been allowed” (5) by emphasizing the centrality of “private judgment” (6) in his philosophy and its fictional manifestation as first-person narration, which calls upon the reader to exercise his or her private judgment.

Clemit also contends that Godwin is better placed within the larger tradition of imaginative Romantic-era novelists than within the narrower and shorter Jacobin movement. Clemit sees Godwin’s major works not as responses to the French Revolution but as more strongly influenced by indigenous philosophies such as Puritan free choice and Rational Dissent, an eighteenth-century religious and radical movement associated with Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. His use of allegory can be traced to his readings of religious texts such as the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, which feature a “progressive narrative form, unified by a single-minded quest for spiritual truth” (5).

In Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, this quest takes the form of the flight and pursuit of the title character, a plot structure which, like its first person narration, is taken up by Brockden Brown and Shelley, whose works are discussed in Part II. With their tales of overzealous individualism, ambition, and individual moral mistakes, Godwin’s followers use his narrative modes to illustrate what can happen when private judgment leads to negative conquences, though their books attracted more select audiences than those of Godwin. According to Clemit, the process of revision and modification for which Godwin has been criticized is an outgrowth of his philosophy and a feature of the Godwinian novel tradition.

07 July 2004 at 11:19 AM, post #43

Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Kelly first defines the English Jacobins as English liberals or radicals whose opponents labeled them and depicted them solely as supporters of the French Revolution. Political societies and informal circles connected English Jacobins, who, according to Kelly, opposed tyranny, detested violence and sought change through rational discussion, while distinguishing between principle and practice. Eventually, their cause came to be seen as too closely connected to the French Revolution, leading to their persecution by the government-led Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. With the failure of the Revolution and ensuing loss of faith in reason as an absolute and progressive power, according to Kelly, Jacobins backed off their rationalistic guns and appealed to concepts of sympathy and sensibility that they had previously spurned.

Kelly delves into themes in Robert Bage’s writing; Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story and Nature and Art; Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives, Hugh Trevor, and Bryan Perdue; and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Fleetwood. According to Kelly, the form as well as the content of these Jacobin novels is philosophical.

The book’s conclusion situates the English Jacobin novel as a subgenre of the novel and places it in relation to the Romantic movement. The novel, as a “domestic” form of literature and a “bourgeois reaction to the chivalric and romantic national literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” (261-2), was the natural accompaniment to political and philosophical treatises, but these values also contradicted its call for universal humanism. The Jacobin novelists’ movement towards Romanticism, according to Kelly, reflects the influence of women who taught male Jacobins that rationality was not the only truth. Finally, Kelly concludes, “just as the French Revolution proclaimed itself to embody the Enlightenment at the same time that it inverted most of the principles of the Age of Reason, so Romanticism in England both absorbed and rejected English Jacobinism as the domestic manifestation of the Revolutionary spirit” (268-9).

07 July 2004 at 11:12 AM, post #42

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Like Paul Gilroy, Linebaugh and Rediker use maritime terminology to describe the social and economic currents connecting Britain, America, the Caribbean and Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their central image is of the mythical hydra, a many-headed monster whose defeat by Hercules became an allegory for controlling opposition to growing labor systems. The book discusses, roughly chronologically, various insurgencies which threatened social and economic systems which were still developing and whose successes were not yet taken for granted. Linebaugh and Redikir include chapters on the wreck of the Sea-Venture, the English serving class, “A Blackymore Maide Named Francis,” the Putney debates of 1647, the oppressions and rebellions of sailors and pirates, the New York Conspiracy of 1741, the American Revolution, Edward and Catherine Despard, and Robert Weddenburn.

Linebaugh and Redikir’s historical writing is aimed at a general audience and claims to look at history from below, “attempt[ing] to recover some of the lost history of the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy” (6-7) and the repression of this class both at the time and in the annals of history. While these movements seem largely disconnected from much of the written record of revolutionary thought of the time, Linebaugh and Rediker assert that they contributed to “breakthroughs in human praxis- the Rights of Mankind, the strike, the higher-law doctrine” (328) and conclude with vignettes on the radical activities of Olaudah Equiano, Lydia Hardy, Thomas Hardy, Constantin Francois Volney, and William Blake. Ultimately, write Linebaugh and Redikir, the “revolutionary moment” (352) of the early 1790s failed, not only with the French Revolution’s disgrace, but also with the bifurcation of the British proletariat along racial lines, but the authors remain hopefully committed to the legacy of these radical sailors, heretics, Levellers, peasants, slaves, pirates, indentured servants and laborers who resisted slavery and sought to restore the commons.

07 July 2004 at 11:10 AM, post #41

Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850. New York: Random House, Inc., 2002.

Colley studies the captivity narratives of Britons captured during the development of the British Empire. The book includes a list of captivity narratives and suggested secondary reading. These captivity narratives expose the experiences and roles of ordinary, obscure people in empire and, according to Colley, are often ideologically problematic: slanted but also deeply disturbing to readers at the time of publication because of their depictions of vastly different worlds, some of which served to justify and others to question empire.

The book’s introduction discusses the implications of Britain’s size and asks the reader to “consider and complicate the lines between aggresors and the invaded, the powerful and the powerless” (18). The book also endeavors to make connections between narratives from different areas of empire and the British Isles. She writes that while the idea of empire was assumed and accepted during the time period discussed, in actual experience, the British empire did not always prove itself monolithic, powerful and justified. Colley sets out to look at the British “for what they actually were, in their real diversity and limited dimensions, as distinct from how they wished to appear then, and from what they are still stereotypically viewed as being now” (18-19).

The book is divided into three parts, covering the Mediterranean and North Africa, America, and India and Afghanistan. Subjects covered include the American Revolution and perspectives on Christianity and Islam in captivity narratives. The text features numerous maps, portraits, and illustrations by captives.

Colley concludes by arguing that the British empire is not now sufficiently understood. She calls especially for comparison with other empires and study of how the experience of empire transformed Britain. Instead of accepting master narratives about the power of the colonizing state, Colley contends that understanding the “ethnic messiness of their one-time empire” (377) is important for fighting racism. Complicating notions of empire and power is also important, Colley writes, because “[w]e live in a post-colonial world, but we do not yet live in a post-imperial world” (378).

07 July 2004 at 11:09 AM, post #40

Philp, Mark. Godwin’s Political Justice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Philps asks how William Godwin, so fundamentally concerned with rationality, could write his anti-government anarchism alongside such seemingly irrational predictions as the eventual disappearance of music and theatre; marriage, cohabitation and unnecessary copulation; and sleep, aging and mortality. Philps outlines Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, stressing its progressive view of history and contention of human perfectibility.

Philp argues that, within the intellectual context of his times, Godwin didn’t seem quite so irrational; however, his rise to popularity was equaled only by his quick fall from grace into obscurity, which accompanied changing political circumstances and a moderation of his views in the second and third editions of Political Justice. Was Godwinian radicalism merely a fantastic middle-class fad, asks Philps, or was it a part of a broader cogent movement halted only by repression? According to Philps, Godwin is best seen as a man of letters, who, instead of being loyal to a particular philosophical school, based his philosophy of private judgment on the way of life lived by members of his radical literary circles.

Philps draws on sources including Godwin’s diaries to highlight the influence of the Rational Dissent community on his philosophy of private judgment. In Godwin’s Political Justice, each Part of which corresponds to an edition of the primary text, Philps analyzes other influences on Political Justice, such as philosophical predecessors, the Debate on France, early radical organizations, Godwin’s fictional works, his relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, and the dissolution of his radical literary circles by the late 1790s.

07 July 2004 at 11:03 AM, post #39

Handwerk, Gary. "Of Caleb's Guilt and Godwin's Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams." English Literary History, 60:4 (1993): 939-960.

In this article, Gary Handwerk writes that “the tendency of Caleb Williams… runs fundamentally contrary to the explicit political assumptions and expectations of Political Justice- but, for that very reason, they need to be read in a complementary fashion as parts of a comprehensive perspective” (940). He outlines some of the basic tenets and implications of Political Justice which later become complicated in Godwin’s fiction: in his philosophy, Godwin values political concerns over ethics and believes that benevolence and impartiality can overcome power.

Handwerk explores the implications of both the published and unpublished endings of Caleb Williams in relation to Godwin’s philosophy, viewing the unpublished ending as a predictable conclusion to a novel which illustrates the overwhelming strength of unjust social systems. He outlines two potential readings of the more ambiguous published ending. One reading shows Caleb’s sympathy towards Falkland as stemming from a consciousness that Falkland is also trapped in such systems, and, according to Godwinian principles, Caleb’s mistake is seeking justice in court instead of through personal reconciliation. In other words, Caleb fails to live up to Godwinian ideals of impartiality and benevolence necessary to create a more just Britain. In a second reading, Caleb fails to meet standards of impartiality and benevolence because he applies these standards only to Falkland’s case and not his own and because he does not rationally judge the strength of power differentials, “permit[ting] ideology to continue to function invisibly behind a façade of personal psychological agency” (950).

Handwerk concludes that readers might effectively respond to the text not by identifying with Caleb but by negatively evaluating Caleb’s self-abasement and identification with Falkland and by interrogating connections between sympathy and ideology. Godwin’s fiction and philosophy, he argues, should not be read in conflict or agreement with one another, but instead as different sides of Godwin’s exploration of “the complex interdependence of affective apprehension and a rational, yet historically conditioned, sense of justice” (956).

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